(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
I intended to weblog about this particular topic for some time but never got a chance to do it till now. So I am glad I am finally getting my hands on it: RSS: It’s Not Just for Bloggers Anymore. Certainly, this would not be any new piece of news for those folks who are very knowledgeable about RSS (a.k.a. Really Simple Syndication) and who may be using it on a daily basis. However, I would think that lots of people may still think that RSS is just handy whenever you need to follow up on a number of different weblogs; the larger the number, the better. And nothing else. So that would explain why this particular procotol has not had much attention so far, it looks like.
There are a number of different studies that clearly indicate that RSS hasn’t really picked up with Internet users as much as weblogs have done so far. Yet, we see how every day large corporations are paying lots of attention to this new way of keeping up with different sources of information. So why is there all the hype about it ? Why are there quite a few companies looking into adopting this relatively new technology if it really hasn’t got that much attention from the Internet end-users? You would expect that would be the other way around, wouldn’t you?
Specially, when the latest one to show their support for Really Simple Syndication has been Microsoft with the recent announcement Microsoft will be introducing RSS with Longhorn and IE7. Although there doesn’t seem to be any significant changes from that announcement it would be interesting to see how it develops. More than anything else because it would just come out when RSS probably has moved on already into other areas of expansion. This way, end-users would need to find new roles for what RSS is and how it is supposed to be used, thinking that there are plenty of businesses looking forward to their implementation.
So it is then when you bump into weblog entries like this one: RSS is Not Only for Blogs, when you come to realise, really, about the huge potential RSS has for not only the Internet end-users but also for the business corporate world. In that particular weblog post over at RSS Specifications there is a large enough list of items and applications that would benefit from implementing Really Simple Syndication. And clearly from that post onwards, I doubt that people would be associating RSS feeds with the concept of weblogs. It all started with weblogging and its syndication, but then things seem to have expanded and improved and therefore there is a whole brave new world out there that would just basically work on developing and implementing RSS feeds for something else than just weblogs.
So if you haven’t seen yet what you could get out of Really Simple Syndication I would strongly suggest you get to read RSS is Not Only for Blogs. I bet that once you have finished reading through it your opinion about RSS will change and, hopefully, we shall get to see what will be happening in the short / medium-term. Definitely, it will no longer be associated with weblogs alone but with a whole bunch of other different tools and web sites available out there. The possibilities are almost endless. And while reaching out for the information that matters to you we will continue to see how things improve, not only from the quality of the content feed, but also from an end-user point of view.
